Patricia Stewart > Patricia's Quotes

“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”
― Truman Capote, Answered Prayers

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”
― Truman Capote

“Reading dreams. That's what started her walking down the road. Every day she'd walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin'.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o'clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There's no hurry, for there's nowhere to go and nothing to buy...and no money to buy it with.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
― Upton Sinclair

“Wall Street had been doing business with pieces of paper; and now someone asked for a dollar, and it was discovered that the dollar had been mislaid.”
― Upton Sinclair

“They use everything about the hog except the squeal.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

“The deepest shade of twilight did not send him from his favourite plane-tree. He loved the soothing hour, when the last tints of light die away; when the stars, one by one, tremble through aether, and are reflected on the dark mirror of the waters; that hour, which, of all others, inspires the mind with pensive tenderness, and often elevates it to sublime contemplation. When the moon shed her soft rays among the foliage, he still lingered, and his pastoral supper of cream and fruits was often spread beneath it. Then, on the stillness of night, came the song of the nightingale, breathing sweetness, and awakening melancholy.”
― Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho Volume 1 of 2

“There is an Indian proverb that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emtional, and a spiritual . Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.”
― Rumer Godden

“I loved Mr. Darcy far more than any of my own husbands.”
― Rumer Godden

“It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot 'do'; they can only be done by.”
― Rumer Godden, The Dolls' House

“People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.”
― Judith Guest, Ordinary People

“Depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling.”
― Judith Guest

“Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either.”
― Judith Guest, Ordinary People

“. . . crazy world or maybe it's just the view we have of it, looking through a crack in the door, never being able to see the whole room, the whole picture.”
― Judith Guest, Ordinary People

“I keep telling you that feeling is not selective. You can't feel pain, you aren't gonna feel anything else either.”
― Judith Guest

“The small seed of despair cracks open and sends experimental tendrils upward to the fragile skin of calm holding him together.”
― Judith Guest, Ordinary People

“Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningles actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.”
― Judith Guest, Ordinary People

“I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Elizabeth Appell

“Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“All in all, it was a never-to-be-forgotten summer — one of those summers which come seldom into any life, but leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going — one of those summers which, in a fortunate combination of delightful weather, delightful friends and delightful doing, come as near to perfection as anything can come in this world.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams

“He sighed profoundly, and flung himself - there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word - on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stopped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer's evening were woven web-like about his body.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby